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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

On one end of the spectrum is Blu Homes (https://www.bluhomes.com/) which builds pre-fabricated homes that aren't quite so boxy as mobile homes. We looked at investing in them when they started up and perhaps getting one of their smaller units for a piece of land up in the Sierra foothills[1].

Shipping container homes are also a sort of niche thing at the moment. Realistically though it isn't the walls that cost the money on a house, its all the stuff that goes in the walls :-) (wiring, pipes, insulation, Etc.)

From an extreme perspective you have the Broad Group in China who was building pre-fab skyscrapers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City_(Changsha)) that would house a thousand families.

[1] I ended up doing neither for different reasons but I know a couple who bought one and they really enjoy it.

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> Shipping container homes are also a sort of niche thing at the moment.

I spent a lot of time researching these homes. Outside of situations where they're being used as glorified sheds, it's not really cheaper to construct a home with them. Which is a bit disappointing, because there is a certain "green" aspect to them that I find appealing.

You want to be real careful with the paint they use, it’s very far from green or healthy.

Blu Homes (from their website) are from $200K - $550K. That might sound cheap in some areas but if you're comparing to a traditional "manufactured home" it's close to an order of magnitude higher.

Absolutely. It is "cheap" when the median price of a home is $1.5M it is "expensive" when the median price of a home is $150K.

The point though is that it addresses the 'variation in pre-manufactured homes' question. There are people out there building pre-manufactured homes, that mix up the formula with high end amenities.

As I see it, there are two vectors on these things, their shapes, and what you can get inside of them. The traditional mobile home type home is limited to 'single' straight and long and 'double wide' and long. That accommodates and optimizes for the lot shapes that typical mobile home parks allocate for these homes.

The market value and construction cost are two very different things.

That is true, but looking at the whole picture which is you start with a lot, then you add a house, and now you have an improved lot with a house on it. That thing you end up with at the end, has a market value which can be compared with other houses in the area for their market value.

My home insurance covers the cost to rebuild my house in the event it is destroyed, but it protects the market value of my house because even if it is destroyed I can rebuild it to the same size and specification and have a house with possibly added market value because its made of newer material (and I would add more outlets than it currently has :-)

I agree that those two costs are very different things, but their linkage is, for me, inescapable.

With a lot of those $1.5M homes, a large LARGE portion of the value is the land/location, not so much the physical structure too. You gotta price that in for these types of "great deal" homes.

Those bluhomes are really expensive. You could have a bespoke home built in-situ for those prices. What is their strength?

7 days of on site assembly. If you are building a cabin in the Sierras (for example) where the building season is short, and the availability of skilled carpenters, plumbers, electricians, Etc. is challenging, you can transport this pre-built home and erect it.

I think there are a number of companies building modular homes. IKEA has a join venture with a construction company for example [0]. Just that construction isn't generally the problem. We know how to build relatively cheaply.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0dbRKACktA [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgu7ZK894gs

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